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Vladimir Ivanovich Kirillov
Prolific User
Username: soviet

Post Number: 1649
Registered: 02-2013
Posted on Sunday, 22 September, 2019 - 05:48:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

A few years back my daughter got brainwashed by the multi million dollar advertisements made by Jeep and she was not at all happy about me telling her not to buy a new Jeep.

My advice was based upon observing a large number of Jeeps having engine failure because the motors were made in Mexico and the pistons would disintegrate throwing the connecting rod through the side of the engine block. That in itself pointed directly to the fact that some engineer had not done his maths right and having a vehicle that drops its guts in the outback while you are pulling a caravan around the vast distances of Australia with your wife and dog in your winter years is not a good thing.

But Jeep continued to run advertisements at big expense in an effort to convince the cashed up retirees that Jeep was the one to buy.

I was never convinced.

Yesterday, news.com.au ran a story about a young family who with two kiddies and with a mortgage entered Jeep hell.

Yes their $50,000 Jeep had a fuel pump failure that sent tiny pieces of metal right through the fuel system destroying the engine. I have never heard of such a caper. How did the fuel filter fail to stop the metal particles? Seems like an engineer got his maths wrong again.

Media reported the vehicle was purchased from a Jeep dealership and always serviced on time.

Jeep has presented this young couple with a quote to repair THE THING of a mere $47,500.

Jeep Australia has told the couple sorry but we cannot help you at all then told the media sorry we cannot comment because the matter is before the fair trading people.

Hmmmn I thought, what idiot in senior management would allow this horror story to hit the Australian press? Would it not have been in Jeep's financial interest to throw $47,500 into to the mix and help this young couple?

$47,500 would definitely net you a damn good low mileage Spirit or Spur in excellent condition and a good service history.

But I have a bigger question: Has anybody heard of a late model RR/B with a fuel pump failure that destroyed the engine? If you have please let me know.
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Mike Thompson
Frequent User
Username: vroomrr

Post Number: 984
Registered: 04-2019
Posted on Sunday, 22 September, 2019 - 07:27:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

Japanese cars were the first cars to be able to be driven over 100,000 miles without having to rebuild the engine. This was due to Gen. Douglas MacArthur and quality guru W. Edwards Deming. MacArthur's principal contribution as supreme commander for the Allied Powers in Japan (1945-1951)--a de facto dictator--was to break apart an outdated and ossified economic and social structure, allowing Japan's inherent creativity to blossom. On the corporate front, MacArthur smashed the grip of Japan's family trusts, known as zaibatsu, which had dominated Japan's economy for decades and sent their avaricious tentacles into every corner of economic life. Although some survived in modified form, including Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Sumitomo, the retrenchment opened the field to a new breed of innovators with names like Sony, Honda, Toyota and Panasonic that would over the next 30 years catapult Japan onto the global stage. And MacArthur invited Deming to Japan.

Quality guru W. Edwards Deming: Deming urged companies to concentrate on constant improvements, improved efficiency and doing it right the first time. Deming was a professor of statistics at New York University when he was invited to Japan in 1950 to run a seminar for business leaders. Since the 1930s, Deming was interested in using statistics as a tool to achieve better quality control. Essentially, his idea was to record the number of product defects, analyze why they happened, institute changes, then record how much quality improved, and to keep refining the process until it is done right.

I like (older) Japanese cars for this reason.
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Patrick Ryan
Grand Master
Username: patrick_r

Post Number: 2152
Registered: 04-2016
Posted on Sunday, 22 September, 2019 - 08:16:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

Very interested read there Mike.

I agree with Vlad, some Jeep shockers I have heard as well.
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Trevor Hodgekinson
Experienced User
Username: wm20

Post Number: 69
Registered: 11-2006
Posted on Sunday, 22 September, 2019 - 10:45:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

The problem can be expressed in 3 letters MBA
Since harvard came up with this school we have been stuck with managers that are "All made of ticky tacky and all think just the same' to pervert the song.
So markets are all infinite
Consumers are all idiots
And the measure of success is a high P:E ratio
The measure of efficency is a high I:C ratio.
And all business are the same.

Over time the pool of directors had become so inbred it is not funny, They are all lawyers or accountants.

The first group group makes every decision on a liability limiting basis and the second on profit increases for this quarter.

And because both are rewarded according to yesterdays share price both spend too much effort doing things that will impress the day trading screen jockies and push up the share price.

None of them care about the longevity of the company because it is not their name on the products nor on the factory roof.

Even worse managers & directors are judged on the difference in the share price between their commencement to their departure so as long as they jump ship just before a company's share price peaks they are considered to be financial Gods and the poor fools who tries to fix their mess are labled the destroyers.

One of the reasons why Germany became and remains a manufacturing powerhouse is the management still comes up from the shop floor. The boards of VW, Mercedes, BMW all have between 1/3 to 1/2 of the board either taken off the shop floor or voted in from the shop floor. Thus the information management uses to make decisions is good and related to the product or company, not about how the market will perceive it.

.
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ross kowalski
Prolific User
Username: cdfpw

Post Number: 1239
Registered: 11-2015
Posted on Sunday, 22 September, 2019 - 10:50:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

Vlad,

Direct injection motors have this issue.

Gas or diesel is pressurized with a pump to a common pressure rail at crazy high pressures. No filter between the pumps and the rail. Pump fails, trashed fuel system.

Late model ford diesels are known for this failure mode as well.

Mike,

Good call on Deming being the reason no one buys american cars.

One point though, the goal was not to improve until it was done right, but to always be improving.

Patrick,

The most approachable book by Deming is "Out of the crisis" Also a quick read.
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Trevor Hodgekinson
Experienced User
Username: wm20

Post Number: 70
Registered: 11-2006
Posted on Sunday, 22 September, 2019 - 15:17:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

There are good things and bad things about the constant change production technique.
I play with motorcycles
There is 3 different primary chain case covers for BSA A 50 / 65 /70 engines and all will interchange so it is not hard to keep them on the road.
There are 14 different ones on kawasaki Z 900's and very few will interchange which makes keeping old ones on the road quite difficult.
As for injection, there is a filter between the lift pump and the pressure pump.
On the L300's there is a filter on each injector so if the lift pump stops you run dry and if the pressure pump goes then the only place for the crud to go is back into the tank.
The lift pump has a gauze on it to protect the pump so I could not see it doing much in the way of damage
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Trevor Hodgekinson
Experienced User
Username: wm20

Post Number: 71
Registered: 11-2006
Posted on Sunday, 22 September, 2019 - 15:41:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

You also have to remember that Japan has a totally different culture and in particular "keeping face"
Mr Toyota would consider it an insult to him, his family his ancestors and his workers if there was a major problem with his products.
The Ford family would have a laugh about it while drinking $ 1000.00 glass champers and only care if the profits took a hit.
When a Japanese company took over another company no one got sacked and there were a lot of take overs.
When there was excess capacity the company would look around to see what they could make with that capacity.
British & Australian management in the same situation would be looking at maximum redundencies.
This flows down to the workers who feel unwanted & unappreciated so they do not put the effort into making the quality that they should.
In my brief professional career it was one of my big bugbears.
If we wanted to install new equipment, the new technology has to replace sufficient workers for the redundicies to cover the purchase price within the current financial year .
Originally thought it was just the management at Sims, but it was the same everywhere that I went.
So we then end up with a workforce that is hostile to any new technology
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Vladimir Ivanovich Kirillov
Prolific User
Username: soviet

Post Number: 1654
Registered: 02-2013
Posted on Sunday, 22 September, 2019 - 18:23:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

Well Trevor perhaps Mr Toyota needs to find his katana and perform Hari Kari now and display a few intestines on the ground because the V8 Diesel LandCruiser was a total stuff up of biblical proportions.

It has its starter motor in the Vee of the engine sitting on an plastic pad where it rots from humidity, then brakes are lousy from new and it uses 1mm wiring in its harness which breaks necessitating replacement of the entire harness.

Not to mention of course to change the starter motor all the induction gear has to be removed, yes figure on 9 hours to change a starter motor. That is extremely bad bordering on crazy engineering.

And I could give you more cases of Japanese stuff ups going back to the 1960s.
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ross kowalski
Prolific User
Username: cdfpw

Post Number: 1240
Registered: 11-2015
Posted on Sunday, 22 September, 2019 - 21:59:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

Trevor,

The constant improvement is in the production of whatever widget you happen to be in the business of making.

Constant change is a different thing all together and that sickness is a result of two factors as I see it.

The is that there is no quarterly profit for a company after the original owner. So if a redesign makes it so marketing can brag or that the part production gives a net reduction in cost, well there you go.

The second is because they can. Fiddling this things is in engineer's natures. With each development in production technique it gets more cost effective to make changes so changes are made.
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Brian Vogel
Grand Master
Username: guyslp

Post Number: 2972
Registered: 06-2009
Posted on Monday, 23 September, 2019 - 00:27:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

In any case, since the Jeep in question is certainly not within warranty period, who would pay the equivalent of US $32,150 to repair it? You can buy a used replacement, and of a number of makes, for far less than that.

I've never heard of this specific mode of failure before, but have no doubt that virtually anything can happen. But in the final analysis it's about how often does it happen and it's awfully clear that this doesn't happen often for any maker, as direct injection fuel injection has been dirt common for a very long time now.

The age of the vehicle had to be "just enough" that Jeep didn't think they'd have a PR nightmare on their hands when the news hit the press and, apparently, they were right.

Vlad, we know your opinion on all things modern as far as automotive engineering goes, but by all objective measures, and across the western manufacturing universe, the longevity and reliability of cars has only been increasing. There are some very stupid engineering decisions based upon long-term maintenance needs for rarely replaced items, that's for sure, but I worry very little about those because of the "rarely replaced" aspect. What makes me crazy is when the same stupidity occurs for either frequently replaced, reasonably expected that replacement will occur at least several times over the full lifetime of the vehicle, or regular service items.

We won't get into makers who require an engine to be dropped in order to do a spark plug replacement.

Brian

P.S. to Ross: Thanks for making the point that there is a difference between constant process improvement, per Mr. Deming, and constant change in the thing being made. Though changes to the thing being made can sometimes be one aspect of constant process improvement.
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Vladimir Ivanovich Kirillov
Prolific User
Username: soviet

Post Number: 1656
Registered: 02-2013
Posted on Monday, 23 September, 2019 - 04:33:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

There is another question Brian and that is why $47,500 AUD to repair it? The article said the parts cost $40,000 AUD alone. That leaves $7,500 for labour which means the Jeep dealership was going to take approximately 75 hours to fix THE THING! Just an aside Brian but here car dealerships have recently been caught out red handed by a consumer watchdog for not sharing their data with independent mechanics thereby forcing the public to pay more for repairs. Nasty, the dealerships will cop it big time now for that greedy slimey over capitalistic monopolization. Dealerships can never be trusted and I have known that since the 1960s.

This was a Jeep, not a Ferrari, not even a Cadillac.

A few years back CadPower in New Mexico quoted me $8000 USD to provide a Cadillac 600 bhp 500ci engine. We have down here a company who can make up adapter plates to mate just about any engine to any transmission.

The 472-500 Cadillac engines are bullet proof and can run to 300,000 miles before a rebuild. I have never heard of a 472-500 engine ever being destroyed by a fuel pump or throwing a connecting rod through the side of an engine block.

Of course there are other engines that could have been used that would not disintegrate the transmission and final drive of a late model Jeep.

Jeep management was crazy to ever let this story hit the press and it will cost them a packet in lost sales and deservingly so. Jeep has a bad name in Australia and that is a pity because the Cherokees from the 1970s were good cars and so good that they are rising in value.

Australians always stick up for the underdog Brian so when a story like this one hits the press you are guaranteed Jeep is going to suffer it bigtime.

But Brian what puzzles me is how can metal particles from a fuel pump destroy an engine. More precisely do you think it is possible that metal particles could past the injectors and get into the cylinders and destroy engine or could it be that only the fuel system is destroyed and that costs $47,000 AUD to replace?
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Brian Vogel
Grand Master
Username: guyslp

Post Number: 2973
Registered: 06-2009
Posted on Monday, 23 September, 2019 - 07:06:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

Vlad,

The whole situation is, how shall I say it, quite suspect.

I am not disagreeing with virtually anything you are saying, either. This was plain stupid of the management of Jeep to have allowed this to go so far as to hit the press.

I will say this, though, there are plenty of occasions where, when dealing with modern cars, electromechanical and electronic devices, where repair becomes more expensive than replacement. It also happens earlier. That being said, it also happened in the past, too. The fate of most SY cars was to die from a combination of lack of use then, when things had to be replaced because of that lack of use, it being "uneconomical" to do so.

And I think the same thing is going to happen to current production Rolls-Royce cars in droves in the coming years. They are insanely expensive to maintain, and I don't care how insanely wealthy owner one may be, you can be assured that by the time owner two is involved, and definitely owner three, that the idea of paying a couple of thousand dollars (US) for tires is just not going to float. Modern Bentleys are definitely more commonly seen on the roads here (they've become a "bling car") and more frequently at auto auctions/salvage yards, too.

Those buying even stratospherically expensive automobiles resent paying stratospherically high bills for standard maintenance. An oil change on a Phantom should not be any different or cost any more than an oil change on my Sedan de Ville, apart from the additional couple of quarts of oil probably needed. There's nothing mystical about either the oil used in these cars nor the oil filters (or at least there is no need for there to be). And the conversations here recently about cars with two water-cooled alternators made my jaw drop.

Brian, who just doesn't get what I consider "Rube Goldbergian needless complication" and can't fathom why any automotive engineer would indulge in it - but they do
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Brian Crump
Experienced User
Username: brian_crump

Post Number: 182
Registered: 02-2007
Posted on Monday, 23 September, 2019 - 07:58:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

Before we become too excited about the hours required to change parts on a Toyota, we need to ask why does it take 17 hours to change the starter motor on a Bentley Continental GTC? Possible answer, to ensure the dealer has an income.
Regards,
Brian
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ross kowalski
Prolific User
Username: cdfpw

Post Number: 1243
Registered: 11-2015
Posted on Sunday, 29 September, 2019 - 23:40:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

Brian,

The necessities involved in getting a car to run the expected 100k miles without a service, while delivering 40mpg and providing surviveability in a 80mph head on collision, well... cars are going to be difficult to service with computers, non-repairable non-eco-friendly plastic everywhere and parts placed awkwardly located by computer optimization.

If somehow they made a super reliable car with easily serviceable parts you would think they would sell a million. Turns out they do it's called the Toyota Corolla ( or Honda Accord, or a hundred other names)

Me, I will be happily spinning up old iron and loving every minute of it. (He says as he heads out to take the wife for a drive in the Shadow)

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